Commonwealth & Psychology

Parenting is Hard

Parenting advice: being a good parent does not mean playing constantly as an ideal parent, but adjusting our behavior according to the needs of our child. Ideally, the roles should be like clothes: adapt them to the situation and allow them to change (or even give up) when they are no longer fit.

A play of a certain role means behavior according to a certain statute of each status, each role being associated with a multitude of defining behaviors. We do not have to confuse the role with the status. A role is associated with status, but there are roles we play, even though we do not hold this status in reality, and there are people who, although they have the status, refuse to play the proper role. One of the major parenting strategies is summed up by understanding the distinction between role play. Often parenting fails due to not acting within the correct status for each situation in part.

For example, parenthood assumes the role derived from it, but there are parents who give up this role, although they are parents in reality: the case of parents who are not at all present in their children’s lives. Also, the role of the parent can be accessed by any partner of a couple, although in the economic partnership system, there is no parent and child status.

Some roles are complementary, yet they support each other. There is also the situation of parental and child roles because there is no parent without a child and child without a parent. The role of a parent implies a series of behaviors that a person playing this role performs towards another child, for the parent always refers to a child and the role of the child is related to one of the parent.

What behaviors are associated with parent and child roles?

• Taking responsibility for another person in the role of the child;

• Make decisions and make choices for someone else (the child);

• To protect another person who assumes the role of the child;

• To support different people (financially, emotionally, through services;

• To set limits and conditions for the child;

• Take care, care for the good of the child.

Also being in the role of a child in a relationship involves letting someone else (the parent) take responsibility for aspects of your life, make decisions and make choices for you, protect you, support you, to set limits and conditions, to take care of you. The child does not fully assume responsibility for himself, does not make certain decisions by himself, does not put limits on the relationship with parents or people with authority, and lets them decide for themselves, influence them, control their lives.

The role of the parent has gradually been built up and is impregnated both by your personal experiences when you were a child and by the experiences of the significant people around you. Your parents certainly put their mark on how you represent your parent role. The relationship with them has taught you how it feels to have a loving, permissive, understanding or otherwise authoritarian, distant, uninterested parent. But they were not the only landmarks. The parents of other children since you were little, the models promoted by society, the way your friends behave when they become parents, all these factors contribute to the way you represent the image of a parent.

Parenting is hard and the role of parents is not just thoughts, but also emotions, desires, and fears. They have their roots in your childhood experience. Positive emotions come from pleasant memories and form the ideal part of parenting. It encompasses all the features you have admired to the others, and you are hoping to make it too, in relation to your child.

The negative emotions accompanying the parent role come from painful memories, and they form the anti-model part, that is, those features that you do to a parent. The anti-model includes all the traits that hurt you when you were a child: severity, carelessness, abuse, coldness, injustice. The longer you lived in these moments, the more the anti-model is more accentuated. And, the more anti-pattern is, the more your fear of sowing with it is stronger.

From the moment you truly became a parent, the role has changed a lot: many of the expectations in the past have changed, you have given up many beliefs and created new ones. The emotions associated with what it means to be a parent have also changed: if you imagine you will feel in a certain way, the reality is likely to surprise you.

In healthy relationships between adults, each person is responsible for himself, no one is the parent of the other, and no one gives up personal power to the detriment of someone else. No one saves, does not change, controls, does not care, does not put limits and conditions, does not make decisions in place of the other.